News

Since we started work in 2010, data from seabird tracking at Puffin Island has contributed to ongoing work by the RSPB on seabird movement and conservation. Recently some of the major findings and outputs from this research have been released on their website.

We were pleased to help Dr Toby Driver and his team and colleagues from the CHERISH project as they surveyed the historic buildings on the island, particularly the church and telegraph station. They will shortly be reporting on this in more detail on their Facebook page.

My name is
Will Bevan, and I have just completed a Master’s degree in Conservation and
Resource Management at the University of Liverpool. As part of my degree I had
to develop a research project which would contribute to a large chunk of my
final grade. Having been fascinated by seabirds for a long time but never being
able to get any experience working with them, I jumped at the chance to work on
Puffin Island, signing myself up for a project looking at what factors were
influencing the ecology of the European shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis) population on the island. Although the
breeding season is now over, this post is a summary of my fieldwork and other monitoring
activities I took part in over the spring and summer this year, as well as the
findings of my research project.

Our first trip
out took place on a grey day in early April, with my supervisor Jon Green and
another master’s student Joe Hanlon. This was mostly a day to become familiar
with the island and to see how the birds were faring, with some of the birds
having already begun to lay eggs. I was instantly enthralled with the island,
having never worked in a seabird colony before, and was more than a little
trigger happy with my camera that day. I couldn’t wait to return.

Coming back in
early May, the breeding season was already well under way for some of the
birds, and I began to monitor the nests of shag pairs as part of the
productivity monitoring which has been conducted by the Seabird Ecology Group
at the University of Liverpool (SEGUL) since they started working on the island
in 2010. This involved visiting nests in three distinct plots; named the ledge,
main and beach plots, and counting the number of chicks and eggs in each nest
every time I visited the island until the chicks had fledged or the nests
failed. From working out the mean number of chicks which fledged per nest over
the breeding season, an estimate of productivity for the population on Puffin
Island could be determined for this year. This is useful because it can help us
see how productivity is changing from year to year, and so we can determine
what factors in any given year might be influencing it. We can also use
information on productivity to create accurate population models which can predict
changes in the size of the population on the island.

In late May a
number of us from SEGUL and others from different agencies and
organisations helped conduct a survey of the gulls on the island, which had not
been undertaken since 2014. Over the course of three glorious but unrelentngly
hot days (especially as there is nowhere to take shelter on the island), we
counted 1105 nests, and all three species; herring, lesser black-backed and
greater black-backed, had increased in numbers.

Another aspect
of my project involved looking at how the number of shags had changed on the
island since the first count of the population in 1979. Whilst I used counts
taken by Natural Resources Wales for this, a complete census of the shags on
the island had not been undertaken since 2010, and so over two days in mid-June
I went along with the SCAN ringing group to count shag nests as they tried to
ring adult and juvenile shags and razorbills, and inaccessible nests were
counted by boat. I was also able to ring a few of the birds myself, an
opportunity I had not had before, and was invited back to help on another day
of ringing, this time primarily for guillemots and cormorants. These days were
exhausting and slightly nerve wracking, whether perching on the edge of the
cliffs with a bag full of guillemot chicks ready to be ringed tied to my arm,
or herding skittish cormorant chicks up the steep slopes on the other side of the island. The days were exhilarating though and it was great to see the SCAN
team at work; I was even able to ring a puffin!

My research
back in Liverpool mostly involved bringing together previously collected data
on productivity and population numbers from Puffin Island and seeing how these
had changed over time, as well as whether changes in productivity could be
linked to inter-annual variations in environmental conditions. I also used
tracking data collected for a previous study to identify core feeding areas
used by the shags in the sea surrounding the island. I found that the number of
breeding pairs has been increasing on the island over time, in addition to
productivity. This suggests that the Puffin Island colony is becoming more
established, compared to some places in the UK where numbers have fallen
dramatically in recent years, and this is also the national trend for shags. In
order to fully protect the shags on Puffin Island, which is itself a Special
Protected Area (SPA), this area should be extended to include marine areas used
by the birds.

When fieldwork
was virtually at an end for the season, we returned one last time to the island
in mid-July to collect a camera which had been monitoring kittiwakes. To our
surprise in the main shag plot around 40-50 puffins were perched on the cliffs,
the most we had seen at any one time in the season. It may have been that with
the shags having good year and their chicks fledging relatively early on,
ledges were freed up where the puffins could lay eggs. It was a fitting end to
my fieldwork and I hope that my research will help further understanding of the
European shag population on Puffin Island.

Sorry for the slight delay.....but we have published another paper based on data from Puffin Island, this time looking at behaviour and energy costs of breeding in kittiwakes, the latest work from Phil Collins' thesis. You can read the full paper (for free) at this link.

This paper uses data collected on kittiwakes from Puffin Island to demonstrate a method of interpreting behaviours from accelerometry data. The method we present combines both simplicity and objectivity, and we therefore hope it will be of use to those analysing such data, regardless of their study species.

Today I am going to take some
time to finally tell you about the research on kittiwakes that I have been
doing as part of my Masters course.

I am interested in seabirds because
of their vulnerability and status as an increasingly threatened group of birds. They are also
spatially wide-ranging in their foraging and migratory behaviour, and consequently
make ideal study species for someone like me, who enjoys conducting research using
geographical information systems (GIS). This long distance travel also means
that seabirds are susceptible to the effects of numerous anthropogenic impacts
worldwide. These include plastic ingestion and entanglement, fisheries conflict,
bycatch issues, oil spills and the impact of marine renewable energy developments.

It is
because of this interest that in May I moved to Liverpool (a copy of The Kittiwake by J.C. Coulson under my
arm) with the aim of gaining seabird fieldwork experience and investigating the
foraging behaviour of Puffin Island’s kittiwakes!

Heading to work across the island with Sam Patrick and Jon Green

In the past week SEGUL (Seabird
Ecology Group University of Liverpool) have undertaken 4 trips to the island. Kittiwake
productivity checks at my control plot suggest a higher rate of breeding
success this year than within the rather disheartening last two years: I have observed a productivity of approximately 0.8 chicks per nest. Kittiwakes usually
lay two eggs per year and therefore this figure is still not particularly high,
especially when compared with observations from a decade ago. 73 kittiwake
chicks were ringed this week and 65 retraps/ resightings of adults were made.
Many of these adults have only been resighted a couple of times over the last 5
years which suggests that many are not breeding every year.

Jon on the look out for kittiwakes

Kittiwakes are an Amber listed
species within the UK which have shown breeding population declines over the
last 30 years. These declines are thought to be linked to changes in the marine
environment and prey abundance.

Within my project I am hoping to
analyse how interactions between annual differences in oceanic conditions, possible
prey abundance, kittiwake foraging behaviour and breeding success influence
each other. In order to do this I will work with remotely sensed environmetal data alongside productivity data and GPS tracking data collected
during each breeding season since 2010.

This year we caught 15 kittiwakes
from the cliffs that drop into the Irish Sea from the north side of the island. We attached GPS loggers, using waterproof tape, to their back feathers (see center photo below). Smaller
100 mAh batteries were used this year in order to reduce the disturbance that
the extra mass of the loggers has on the birds. 9 tags were recovered
and no visible signs of plumage damage or distress were observed.

Installing remote cameras to monitor productivity and equipping the birds with their GPS logger backpacks

Given their small size, at first it
is quite surprising that Puffin Island’s kittiwakes have been found to forage up to 75 km from the island, travelling total distances of up to 180
km on these trips. This year the birds tend to have engaged mostly on lots of shorter trip: on
average they have foraged for less than an hour at a time, travelling an average of 11 km in total (up to an average range of 5 km from the colony) in order to find invertebrates
and fish to feed themselves and their chicks. Some longer trips can also be clearly seen in the map below.

Map of kittiwake foraging trips throughout 2015 including some of up to 45 km from the colony. Puffin Island is represented by a white star.

Thursday marked my last day of
Puffin Island fieldwork. If you were to ask me whether I will miss the early
starts, the long drives and train journeys wedged between piles of field gear,
the uphill climb through head-high vegetation, the clamminess of sweat and sun-cream on my
skin, the barking of greater black-backed gulls, the splattering of sludgy poo
falling from the skies, the smell of guano that seems to waft in waves and the random
patches of sunburn that I discover the next day then I would answer yes! I
would more than happily do it all again.

It has been a quiet week or so in
terms of visiting Puffin Island. After leaving the birds to it for a bit,
avoiding unnecessary disturbance, yesterday members of the Seabird Ecology
Group at University of Liverpool and the SCAN Ringing Group returned to the cliffs!

After a 5.30 start in Liverpool we caught the 8.10am boat from Penmon
Point

My first stops were the three
shag monitoring areas where it seems to me that the shags have experienced a pretty
good breeding season. Many nests are now empty, but this isn't due
to reproductive failure. The chicks are now so mature that they run
away when they see me coming and are very close to being fledged.

Satisfied shags looking out to sea

As the sun continued to warm, the
ringers traversed the upper banks of the island. They ringed cormorant chicks (total = 249) as they moved and were covered by guano in the process. Puffin Island is
inhabited by the UK’s largest population of cormorants and because of this is a
designated Special Protection Area of European importance.

SCAN are particularly interested
in ringing cormorants in order to collect data on how long they stay
on the island, whether they remain in coastal habitats or travel in-land and
whether the chicks return when they are mature enough to breed. By interpreting this information they hope to determine
whether conflict with fisheries (and the bird-scaring activities that the
government permit them to deploy) might affect the cormorants from this colony.

If I were a cormorant, I think that I would return

Human-animal conflict is
something that many conservationists work towards understanding and attempting to resolve.
I feel that the public however have become removed from the harsh reality
of death within the natural world.

Despite the island being a site of seabird breeding and start life of thousands of individuals each year, I
find that evidence of death is also extremely evident on every trip that I make. Hungry
seals wait at the foot of the cliffs, looking up with their large eyes, ready
to catch and devour tumbling auk chicks which make their breaks into
the sea without yet even having learnt the ability to fly. Fish bones, crab carapaces
and empty mollusc shells lay discarded – the sign of a seabird feast and the
marine food web in action. Gull carcasses and skeletons are also visible; some
appear to have been trapped beneath rocks, others may have been the weaker
individual within a scrap to the death, whilst dead chicks at varying stages of
decomposure may have been the victim of abandonment or cannibalistic predation.

Monitoring new life alongside a dead gull

I hop around these traces of shells and
bones to visit the cliff where I have been monitoring kittiwake productivity on
an approximately-weekly basis. Equipped with binoculars and a telescope, I have been observing 68 kittiwake nests, nestled upon the shelves of a steep cliff. Yesterday I was excited to see that the majority of
these nests are now filled with clutches of either one or two of the cutest little kittiwake chicks, snuggling beneath their parents, regularly begging for food. This advancement means that
the time has come for us to track adult kittiwake foraging behaviour! This
shall be the focus of my next post.

Although the focus of my MRes project is the black-legged kittiwake, I have also been helping Nana with her shag nest
monitoring. Puffin Island’s population of breeding European shag pairs is the
largest colony in Wales and our monitoring focuses on approximately 80 nests
across three areas: a beach in the south-west, a rocky ledge in the north and
the main larger vegetated/ cliff section.

Basking Shags (main monitoring area)

European shags have been found to be good ecological indicators of the state of the marine environment because their behaviour and breeding success is heavily influenced by environmental factors and prey availability. It is therefore concerning that they are considered
an amber listed species within Europe. Because they are coastal breeders which dive in order to forage for food, shags are also likely to be particularly sensitive to offshore marine developments and therefore monitoring their productivity is particularly important.

As Puffin Island is uninhabited by both humans and terrestrial herbivorous grazers, throughout summer the vegetation grows at an alarming rate. This
has caused me some difficulty in locating some of the shag nests as the season has progressed – I often have to dive head first into guano-splattered bushes in
order to observe the hidden contents of a nest. The adults guarding the nests
also seem to be becoming less hospitable towards me. The hissing females are
easier to ignore, but the rusty motorbike-like honking of the male shags can get
a little exasperating by the end of the day!

Shags have variable
breeding seasons which cover a number of months. This means that some of the Puffin
Island nests still contain eggs (typically clutches of 3), whilst others are home to rather large chicks which are beginning to closely resemble their adult
parents as opposed to scrawny, dinosaur-like lumps.

Neighbouring Shag Nests: A common clutch of three eggs; two young chicks

On Saturday I travelled to the
island with the SCAN ringing group whose aim for the day was to ring shag and
razorbill chicks (pulli). It was a busy day, made slightly trickier by the
morning’s wet conditions turning the dried guano into a slippery layer
that coated the rocks. Between 8.30am and 6.30pm the team managed to ring 135
shag pulli (as well as 164 razorbill pulli). Retrap highlights included a shag that was ringed as a chick in 2001, as well a razorbill adult from 1999 and chick from 2000.

Throughout the last few weeks many of the adults at the main nest site have also been colour ringed. This work, headed by Steve Dodd, will form part of a Retrapping Adults for Survival (RAS) monitoring project.

Combined with a handful of guillemot chicks, gull chicks and a few adults, the total number of
birds ringed on Saturday was 423 – a successful day’s work!